Posted On: Tuesday - February 10th 2026 9:09PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Economics
We got both kinds of writing here!
No, this is not the Peak Roofing Cost blog. You’re quite right. For those not willing to put up with boring roofing cost estimates, you could skip to the polemics of the latter part of this post. (Sorry, I don’t know how long it’s going to be… I’m writing in real time here.)
The point here is to demonstrate that the long-running themes about “work Americans just won’t do”, and “Americans CAN’T do this stuff”, the latter out of people under 50, I guess, are a load of rubbish. Peak Stupidity has already done some quick math regarding Trump’s (even!) “We need the illegals” claim about the Agriculture industry, with produce as an example, and Hospitality industry, with hotel housekeeping as an example. The differential labor cost between cash-paid illegal alien labor and tax-paying Americans is maybe 10% to 15% of your retail costs of the product and service, respectively. We try to be conservative with our estimates too.
Estimation, yes, that’s something I’ve found I’m pretty good at. That includes the tough ones, as I got into it with The Unz Review’s Ron Unz on estimates of the number of illegal Indian and Chinese people in America. Numbers for this are very hard to come by via conventional means, of course. However, I’ve got a whole lot more of an idea than someone that trusts the search sites or AI.* Yeah, there will be a couple of posts…
Roofing estimates are easy enough though. We’ve got most of the numbers very accurately with only a few - illegal labor pay rates, for example, guessed here (again conservatively). I’ll bring up 3 examples, my own roof a decade back, roofs in the local area, and the big roof in my friend’s story, discussed in Breaking Roofing News.
It’s very hard for me to bring up roofing shingles without bemoaning high inflation, first, so, with your forbearance… This post about it is 7 1/2 years old, so I had to go get a new price for architectural shingles. If you’re not going with metal (not a bad idea) or clay, these “architectural” ones are what almost everyone specifies, making the standard shingles ugly in comparison (used for that apples-to-apples inflation calculation, though). Holy cow, they’re $40 - $45 a bundle now, up from ~$22 when I wrote that inflation post. We gotta do this - from $6.66 in the mid-1990s to $40 today (again conservative estimates), I invoked the MoneyChimp site for help with the compounding and got an average of, again, 7% inflation.
Anyway, 3 of these bundles cover what’s called a “square” by roofing people, 100 ft2. A decade ago I made an estimate for my roof that was only 2/3 of what the 3 White guys I made a special effort to hire had figured. This ain’t rocket surgery. It was a simple roof, so you get your house footprint area, add the overhang, divide by the cosines of the slopes, and add extra for ridges and valleys. I was right in MY estimate, and these guys were either wrong or trying to scam me for extra material. All of it, the shingles, tar paper, and the nails were way over-estimated.
I paid them $5,100 in cash. Here we go: I remember the materials ($22/bundle plus the rest) were about $1,600** and that these guys worked for about a day and a half. I’m estimating 15 hours max, so 45 labor hours. In other businesses, with tree-cutting as an example, there can be pretty big fixed costs, upkeep of expensive bucket trucks, chippers, etc. What did these guys have besides a couple of ladders and a small trailer for materials? I doubt they even had insurance, so their fixed costs were negligible. They made $75 per hour! It’s the times when I do these calculations when I think I should have gotten a better price. Then again, I’m glad for guys like these to make some good money, $1,100 for a day and a half’s hard work… AND, the tax man was, that is the welfare-eating mooches were, getting ZILCH.
I’ll go in the other direction with this next example. I’ll watch the Mexican crews of 4 or 5 do a $2,000 ft2 house in the neighborhood in one long day.*** (Removing the old roofing is part of this, of course.) I don’t know how much they make exactly, but I don’t think $30/hr is anything but conservative even in this day and age. Let’s use $35 though. In a 12 hour day, with 5 guys, that’s $2,100 in labor, but let’s call it $2,500. A 2,000 ft2 house with a more complicated and steeper roof could require 35 squares, which is ~100 bundles of shingles. With tar paper, nails, some parts like ridge vents, flashing or drip edges and the like, it could add up to $6,000 in material. Let’s just note here the proportion in labor costs to total so far, only 30%
But, you’re probably not going to get that roof done for $8,500 or $9,500, not in the year ‘26 you won’t! $12,000 is probably a good deal now. Next time I know the owner somewhat, I’ll ask. For these more “professional” jobs than mine, there are dumpsters and a few more fixed costs. The contractors make some good money - that’s the main thing. That’s what I’ll get at with the final example.
In that Breaking Roofing News linked-to above, we discussed a re-roofing job required on a 7,000 ft2 mansion. The insurance company was going to pay out $90,000 for it!! Even half that is good money, as I’ll estimate. There are 2-story parts of the house, but let me estimate most of it as 1-story, so 5,000 ft with a reasonable slope and perhaps many complicated parts. Materials could be as much as $15,000 very conservatively. For labor, one can extrapolate from my roof or the ones nearby, but how about a big crew of 10 guys taking 3 10-hour days? That’s ~$10,000 in labor. Where is that $65,000 going?! Even were it a $50,000 roof,**** as would seem more reasonable, after the odds and ends, the contractor will get a lot of money for his work - sales, management, driving all over in the big-ass pickup for a week. Could Mr. Contractor in his big-ass pickup spare just a chunk of that huge profit - unless I’m making some big mistake, in the tens of thousands pre-tax, to pay Americans somewhat more to do this work?
I imagine the reader at this point might be - if not off to sleep - wondering if Peak Stupidity has turned Communist? Shouldn’t these guys be able to make this good money, if the market allows? Economics aside, after all, they are decent White men for the most part, not your Bezoses and Gateses out-of-touch Billionaires.
Well, sure, if they weren’t CHEATING. The cheating is in that these contractors are reaping benefits of cheaper (not so cheap) labor while the external costs, schooling, healthcare, etc. that these illegals are not supporting as Americans do. Above all this, Economics aside again, the cost to other Americans is the cultural transformation of their society. Where is that noblesse oblige we keep hearing about? The Epstein Island crowd doesn’t have much of it, so why should these roofing contractors? (Because, otherwise we’ll deport their cheap labor and lock them up for violating laws against employment of illegals, is one answer…)
We’re into the polemics now, in case you hadn’t noticed. If everyone’s doing it, why shouldn’t I hire illegals? That’s a decent point, as you don’t want to be at a disadvantage when you quote the job. However, the main point here is, to go back to the simple math for a second, is that the extra labor cost to hire Americans, for any of these guys, will not bankrupt these contractors. They’d still be making good money. $50/hr would get most young guys not already holding some lucrative job up on a roof. The $15, but let’s call it $20, hourly differential means a 60% increase in labor costs. That sounds terrible. It would mean that the labor cost for the houses near me would be an additional $1,200 for those roofs nearby and $6,000 on that mansion roof.
That would cut into profits by 1/4 to 1/3 in the first case, while for that mansion, I don’t even know WTH is going on with all that money. So you set up 2 jobs in a week and, instead of making $7,000 that week, you might make only $4,000. That IS a big hit, so I can see why noblesse oblige for working Americans is not a thing with these guys. OTOH, $4,000 a week is still GOOD MONEY!
The fact that Americans making $50/hr doing roofing WOULD be paying taxes and insurance and therefore not mooching off the system would negate the alleged benefit of illegal alien roofers … framers, plumbers, etc. for society.
PS: I didn’t even bring up the contractor discount, 10% at least, that brings material costs down.
* Ron Unz says “I haven’t seen anything on the whole web even claiming…” Yeah, has anyone given it a try as I have? I’ve got facts from being out and about and talking to people, and then there are known unknowns, such as my knowing there are plenty of illegals in the Chinatowns but not how many.
** That’s after I returned most of the excess, keeping a few bundles and a roll of tar paper for repairs. Good thing I paid for the materials myself and WAS THERE.
*** The point of using big crews for a smaller duration in this job can be summed up in one word: Rain.
**** As I wrote in that post, this crazy estimate of the insurance company has us both wondering. Is something shady going on?
Comments:
Moderator
Wednesday - February 18th 2026 8:00PM MST
PS: Well, this is NO way to have a conversation, but thank you for trying on your end, Possumman. Your ex-roofer sounds like the lyrics of an old Jimmy Buffett song. Good on him… I think.
Possumman
Monday - February 16th 2026 1:58PM MST
PS. Yeah we did some tile roof work too. Crazy expensive. I retired about 6 years ago so I am out of the loop for what pay rates are these days. We only had 1 Hispanic guy while I was there and he was a Cuban guy that stole a little recreational sailboat in Cuba and sailed it to Florida, think he left his problems and a wife there in Cuba.
Moderator
Monday - February 16th 2026 6:55AM MST
PS: Thanks again for writing in, Possumman. I don’t know if you would agree with the main point of this post, that roofing companies can still make good money even if the labor rate were $20 or even $25/hr higher. Of course, some of all of this might be passed on to the customer anyway. I had a tree guy tell me that he couldn’t find any White guys willing to do real work, but now he does have one.
It might seen that young men are just too soft - used to “doing things” only in a virtual sense now, but everyone’s up for making good money, and people can change. Americans did the work before.
I don’t know of too many slate roofs. I was thinking first you meant those half-pipe clay tiles as used in western climates such as in California. They look Californian anyway. Those are probably expensive to fix too, I’d think. I don’t know how they’re fastened on even.
It might seen that young men are just too soft - used to “doing things” only in a virtual sense now, but everyone’s up for making good money, and people can change. Americans did the work before.
I don’t know of too many slate roofs. I was thinking first you meant those half-pipe clay tiles as used in western climates such as in California. They look Californian anyway. Those are probably expensive to fix too, I’d think. I don’t know how they’re fastened on even.
Possumman
Sunday - February 15th 2026 2:38PM MST
PS yeah we did ok mod and it would have been a great job if you didn't have to deal with customers all day and my phone didn't start ringing before 7 am. Still I was there for 20 years with that company. Funnest part was explaining to people with who had a slate roof why it needed repairs. They would say " I thought that roof would last a lifetime!". And I would have to tell them them gently that since their house was built in 1913 that it had lasted the original owners lifetime and then some. Sorry but your roof needs 100 slate replaced at $50 each and new copper valleys at $100/foot!
Moderator
Sunday - February 15th 2026 10:33AM MST
PS: I’m so sorry for the late reply, Possumman. I really appreciate your information. Did you make pretty good money when you were the manager?
What do you think of that over $90K roofing job? I think even at $50K, the company would be making a killing.
Funny you mentioned the van and the magnets, because the 3 guys that did my roof were like that. In fact, the van did not advertise roofing work when I saw it, but I went and asked them, and they said they could do the work. Perhaps they didn’t do it often, explaining while their material estimate was extremely high, I’ll never know.
What do you think of that over $90K roofing job? I think even at $50K, the company would be making a killing.
Funny you mentioned the van and the magnets, because the 3 guys that did my roof were like that. In fact, the van did not advertise roofing work when I saw it, but I went and asked them, and they said they could do the work. Perhaps they didn’t do it often, explaining while their material estimate was extremely high, I’ll never know.
Possumman
Saturday - February 14th 2026 12:28PM MST
PS. When I was manager of a roofing/ remodeling company we often did small jobs in house with our 2 man crews.. When we did reroof jobs we had a couple of subs we used generally an white American super and 4-5 Hispanic guys actually on the roof doing the scut work. They were extremely efficient and knocked out most jobs in a day. Sometimes 2 days if all the gutters and spouts were replaced along with some facia or rake wrap was done. These guys had anonymous white vans with our magnetic logo signs stuck on the sides. They had other company magnetic signs stuck on the insides and could change them as needed. You need to get a roof off and on quick. We also did slate work in-house and that's another crazy expensive job but that is a craft. Shingles are a commodity type job.